Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-Bill Watterson
I don't find that to be useful at all.
Yes of course, all the suffering on Earth is nothing but a footnote in 0.000000001 font size as far as the universe is concerned.
But that's irrelevant. We live on Earth, so what happens here is actually 100% of what matters. Everything else is inconsequential.
For comparison, the Milky Way has an estimate of 5x10^36 Watts so we're talking about the energy output, very briefly, of roughly a trillion Milky Way galaxies.
The other that gets me is amgnetars. These are neutron stars with an insane magnetic field. The strongest detected exceeds 1 billion Tesla, making is 30 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Get too close and it would flatten atoms and ultimately break molecular bonds and rip electrons out of your body. Google seems to think that happens at ~1000km, which is pretty close to get to a neutron star but still, that's a magnetic field.
These things are quite rare and quite unstable. If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong, which means that the gravity is overcoming the strong nuclear force but also the electric repulsion.
Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydrodynamic model of how a magnetar's field gets generated, which would require protons, but it's not the only model and we don't have enough data to be able to rule out other models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-13_nuclear_magnetic_res...
Wait, what? Huh, I have some reading to do. Thanks! :D
I thought neutron stars generally had a shell or crust of iron, which generates a magnetic field (as metals do) if the neutron star is spinning.
They do, but the neutrons themselves also have magnetic properties. (The simplest heuristic way to think of it is that neutrons are made of three quarks, and the magnetic moment is due to the quarks moving around inside the neutron. But that's a highly heuristic picture and leaves out a lot of complications.)
What It’s Like Being Married to Neil deGrasse Tyson - Key & Peele
We’re not the good guys. We rationalize the inescapable selfishness placed there by ages of evolution.
Look man. I am not responsible for any random person or creature that suffers in this world. Lamentations like this ("ease all the suffering") originate in a primate brain that hasn't yet processed that we're no longer a tribe of 100 but there's 10 billion people in this world. Objectively you don't have resources to help more than a few people. And morally, you aren't obligated either.
And btw, I actually do help a person in need, every month with a substantial amount of money. Unlike the occasional act of kindness, helping a complete stranger on a recurring basis is a much harder nut to swallow. Makes you progress really quickly from superficial platitudes like the one you said to the hard, cold reality of the fact that you're losing resources and resources are finite. And that on top of half my income that the state grabs and mostly hands out as welfare anyway. So don't tell me I'm not paying to ease suffering, want or not, I pay through my teeth.
I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.
Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.
> So I commended the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry.
As someone with autism and ADHD; I have spent my life trying to understand better ways to do things, optimisations, doing things "right" or "better" or "faster", and trying to come to terms with others who don't really give a shit about any of it.
The conclusion I arrived at is that the snapshot of time I get in this form is best spent enjoying what this form has to offer, nothing more.
- My sausage'y shaped fingers can't manipulate time or gravity; but they can tickle my children and make them laugh.
- My heart can't fix anything; but it can help me to understand others suffering and guide my actions.
- My eyes can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum; but they can appreciate a beautiful vista and fill me with wonder.
When TFA mentions that a star just ate a planet, I remember just how small and unimportant I am outside a tiny speck of the world; and rejoice that I'm not responsible for anything super important outside that little speck. \o/
I don't like that our culture has developed statements like this.
Every single action you make on planet Earth is more consequential and impactful than the countless parsecs of worthless unobtainable space dust that astrophysicists and science promoters like to glaze over.
Space is nothing compared to the unfathomable amount of synaptic connections in your brain, or the impact you can have on someone's life by hugging them.
Let's piss away all the small blue dot sentiments. They're old and pointless.
You can argue that makes it that much more special, but so what? To the universe, there very well could have been numerous other specials that have come and gone.
Being unable to accept that is pointless.
Without new physics that isn’t even remotely visible on the horizon and that utterly contradicts most of what we believe to be true, this isn’t going to happen. Robotic AI probes sent to other star systems to send back telemetry? Sure, fine. Flesh bags sent to self-replicate on terraformed worlds out in the stars? Not a whisper of a microscopic chance.
@WalterBright, I've always preferred the idea that to explore the stars the only chance we have at doing so is by bio-growing humans (cloned?), and somehow uploading and downloading a current humans consciousness into the form.
basically 'seeding the universe' since we would just start sending little seeds of human life everywhere. :-)
… and all the devices and nutrition necessary to sustain that Terran life until it can become self sufficient—without the help of preexisting humans to teach them or impart physical skills—on a rock with either no life, inhospitable life, or nutritionally incompatible life.
You might as well call that device a magic wand.
With today's technology, sure.
I never thought I'd live to see AI. But here it is.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Clarke
And for what? What do we actually accomplish after pouring vast resources into the dystopian science project of bootstrapping a society of a handful of permanently isolated terrans on a planet we weren’t evolved to survive on light years away?
There’s zero hope of meaningful trade or exploitation of resources. Who is going to light the money on fire to make this happen and why?
This is fantasy material, not reality.
Probably correct, but the transmission of information can be very valuable.
BTW, you'll never know what the lives of your grandchildren will be like. But you make children anyway.
I don't know how many of the kids are going to retain the knowledge.
That said, what good is changing a tire, when there's no tire to change.
And I mean okay, alien intelligence life must be very smart and not contact us because we are so evil and petty and self involved etc. And every single living species we encounter is also the same. Why are we grandstanding these aliens? They are likley sipping coffee in their corner of universe and wondering man why do we keep doing all this nonsense when we are so insignificant etc. That is far more likely to me than aliens who know we exist but willingly stay away because we are humans.
But it is really interesting to read.
Hence why the articles title - which is based on when the light cone of the event reaches us - is actually the better way to think about it. At least there's no "depends how you feel like defining the speed of light today" in it.
[1]https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/topics/meat-and-cance... [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...